• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.603-609
• /
• 2018

It has been widely-reported that the quality of life in Korea is lower than that of the economic growth. In particular, construction managers are reported to have a lower quality of life compared to people in other job types due to the specific nature of the tasks they have to carry out. These include early work attendance time and fewer holidays. In this respect, the aim of this study is to analyse construction managers' requirements on work-life balance. The results showed that the working hours of construction managers were long and their leisure hours were shorter. The requirements for work-life balance were in the order of non-working time, working time, salary, and job security. The requirements by group showed a statistically significant difference in work hours. The requirements on the shortening of work hours were highest in the group of "section chiefs and deputy heads" and lowest in the group of "department heads" and up. It is hoped that the results of this study will be used as basic data for future government-level policy making and construction companies' business directions in relation to the improvement of workers' work-life balance.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2007.03a
• /
• pp.229-238
• /
• 2007

This paper presents a study on construction safety in the People Democratic Republic of Laos (PDRL). Fifty workers experienced certain injuries in their construction sites and 15 top managers were interviewed in twenty-six construction projects in Vientiane, the capital of PDRL. Research results show that stepping on and/or striking against objects (48%), struck by falling objects (24%), falling of persons (12%) are major types of construction injuries. The paper stresses that the ignorance of top managers about their crucial role in safety improvement, using safety incentive to raise safety performance, lack of thorough understanding about benefit from labor safety performance, and the willingness to cut off safety performance expenditures is considered as obstructions of safety improvement programs. The survey indicates that physical working conditions, relationship among workers, foremen behaviors and the monthly wage were influencing factors to worker's job satisfaction. The study also highlights afternoon as dominant time that led to a large number of injuries.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2009.05a
• /
• pp.821-826
• /
• 2009

Current construction simulation approaches mostly focus on operation aspects of construction projects, ignoring managerial aspects which can radically change operational profiles (e.g., number of resources, expected productivity level, or daily working hours) during the course of construction. As a result, these approaches may mislead construction managers into unrealistic execution plans as well as make them difficult to find potential performance improvement areas. As an effort to address this issue, this paper establishes a comprehensive construction modeling framework which integrates operational and managerial aspects of construction projects. The proposed modeling framework will provide construction managers with more accurate, more reliable, and more realistic simulation results thus reducing the likelihoods of schedule delays and cost overruns.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
• /
• 2023.05a
• /
• pp.357-358
• /
• 2023

Due to recent enhance of safety law and regulations in construction sites, safety inspectors have been more required in construction sites. However, most of them are novice for safety inspection which have not enough experience and skill. Therefore, the novice safety inspector's performance on hazard recognition needs to be improved for effective safety management. The performance of safety inspection is influenced by the inspector's experience and background because the inspection is usually conducted by the inspector's eyes. Therefore, there is a difference in safety inspection performance between novice and experienced safety managers. This study aims to analyze the gap of risk perception between novice and experienced safety managers using quantitative visual data. For this objective, this study conducted eye tracking experiments for novice and experienced group to evaluate cognitive performance of safety risk factors. The results provides the level of safety awareness based on their experience in construction safety. The limitation of this study is a lack of the number of samples used in this study and did not consider the various characteristics of the participants. If these limitations are supplemented in future research, it can be used to develop safety education contents for novice safety managers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
• /
• 2020.11a
• /
• pp.55-56
• /
• 2020

The construction industry has the highest occupational fatality and injury rates related to accidents of any industry. Accordingly, safety managers closely monitor to prevent accidents in real-time by installing surveillance cameras at construction sites. However, due to human cognitive ability limitations, it is impossible to monitor many videos simultaneously, and the fatigue of the person monitoring surveillance cameras is also very high. Thus, to help safety managers monitor work and reduce the occupational accident rate, a study on object recognition in construction sites was conducted through surveillance cameras. In this study, we applied to the instance segmentation to identify the classification and location of objects and extract the size and shape of objects in construction sites. This research considers ways in which deep learning-based computer vision technology can be applied to safety management on a construction site.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.15-23
• /
• 2024

Recently, quality problems, such as the collapse of apartment structures under construction, has emerged as a social issue. Although there are various causes of quality problem and the impact of each problem may be different, the problems from the perspective of construction engineer of construction company are investigated. Therefore, this study aim to investigate the adequacy of construction engineer's experience, number of field engineer, timing of engineer deployment at construction sites, etc. in order to resolve quality and safety problems. In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted targeting construction managers to obtain objective opinions. The results showed that the number of construction engineers in construction companies should be increased and that intermediate construction engineers should be increased to enable practical site management for resolving quality and safety problems. In addition, it was found that there was a need to reduce the number of non-regular employed field construction engineers in construction site and at the same time systematically regulate the number of on-site construction engineers, similar to safety managers and quality managers.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
• /
• v.13 no.5
• /
• pp.441-448
• /
• 2013

In recent years, the number of female workers pursuing careers in the construction engineering and management field has increased, despite the fact that the job positions have been traditionally considered as retaining job functions and/or qualities that are more appropriate to male than female. This may be attributed to the fact that the positions also require delicate and/or detail-oriented job functions, which can be successfully performed by female. It is important for project participants to understand the working conditions for female field managers by analyzing their job performance. This study collects expert opinions regarding female's managerial performance on job site. Survey questionnaires were administered to two focus groups, male and female field managers who work for general contractors. This study contributes to encouraging female's social and economic involvement by investigating the challenges they face in the workplace, and provides measures to respond to such challenges.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2015.10a
• /
• pp.154-157
• /
• 2015

Construction industry still requires a lot of laborers to perform a project despite of advance in technologies, and improving labor productivity is an important strategy for successful project management. Since repetitive construction works exhibits learning effect, understanding laborers' learning phenomenon therefore allows managers to have improved labor productivity. In this context, previous research efforts quantified individual laborer's learning effect, though numerous construction works are performed in group. In other words, previous research about labor learning assumed that sum of individual's productivity is same as group productivity. Also, managers in construction sites need understanding about group learning behavior for dealing with labor performance problem. To address these issues, the authors investigate what variables affect laborers' group level learning process and develop conceptual model as a basic tool of productivity estimation regarding group learning. Based on the result of this research, it is possible to understand forming mechanism of learning within the group level. Further, this research may contribute to maximizing laborers' productivity in construction sites.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.281-287
• /
• 2019

To improve the performance of the building construction project, it is important for the site managers to manage effectively so that they can do their best to the site organization. In addition, making decisions are constantly done in site organizations of building construction project, so whether decisions are made appropriately in the organization has a great impact on performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between decision making participation and organizational commitment of site managers to improve the performance of site organizations. The results of this study showed that the site managers tend to be more task oriented than people oriented when making decisions. Also, there was a difference in affective commitment according to decision making type, and there was a weak correlation between decision making participation and organization commitment. This study will help to improve the managerial ability of site organization in building construction projects.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2009.05a
• /
• pp.173-183
• /
• 2009

Knowledge management (KM) is one of the useful management tools in today's project management (PM) practice, such as construction projects. Nobody can deny the importance of "useful knowledge" always helps organizations and project managers shaping a decision. Due to the trend of globalization, it is now very common that an organization may comprise employees from different countries of distinct national-cultures working together. It is also not uncommon that different projects, within an organization, may have their own organizational-cultures which influence its knowledge repository, transfer process and knowledge strategy. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to align all these cultures and consolidate them to benefit the KM process and PM practice. Organizations and project managers understand that different national-cultural and organizational-cultural factors will create impact on the philosophy of KM process which will subsequently affect PM practice. Those factors may affect interpersonal relations and exchange of knowledge between projects and amongst staff. Systematic KM process can utilize the goodness of different employees from distinct cultures which can eventually drive the organization and projects to success. The purpose of this paper, based upon a case study of a Hong Kong construction company, is to discuss how those cultural factors are linked to KM and what organization and project managers can do to improve the KM process and PM practice.